Literature, Science, Psychoanalysis, 1830-1970 Essays in Honour of Gillian Beer

by Small, Helen; Tate, Trudi

• ISBN13: 9780199266678
• ISBN10: 0199266670
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-09-11
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

This book presents fourteen new essays by leading British and American writers on literature, science, and psychoanalysis. Written in honour of Gillian Beer, the collection pays homage to her major contribution to the theory and practice of interdisciplinary studies, with particular emphasis on the evolutionary sciences in nineteenth-century Britain, on psychoanalysis from Freud through to the late 1930s, and on the cultural contexts of science in the first half of the twentieth century.

Author Biography

Biographical Note on Gillian Beer:
Dame Gillian Beer was born on 27 January 1935 in Bookham, Surrey, and was educated at St Anne's College, Oxford. On graduating she lectured at Bedford College, London, (1959-62) and Liverpool University (1962-4). A Fellow at Girton College, Cambridge, between 1965 and 1994, Gillian Beer began lecturing at Cambridge in 1966 and became Reader in Literature and Narrative in 1971. She was made Professor of English in 1989 and in 1994 became King Edward VII Professor of English Literature and President of Clare Hall at Cambridge. She holds honorary degrees from Liverpool University, Leicester University, Cardiff University, Anglia Polytechnic University, and Universite de Paris Sorbonne, and has been awarded medals by M.I.T., St Andrew's University, and the National Autonomous University, Mexico City. Gillian Beer became a DBE in 1998.
She was a Booker judge in 1993, Vice-President of the British Academy from 1994 to 1996, Chairman of the Poetry Book Society (1992-6), and Chairman of the Judges of the Booker Prize for Fiction (1997). She is a Fellow of the British Academy and a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She was a Booker judge in 1993 and Chair of the Booker judges in 1997. Her books include Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1983, 2nd edition 2000) and Virginia Woolf: the Common Ground (1996).

Table of Contents

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS	vii
Introduction	1	(12)
Helen Small
1. Darwin's 'Second Sun': Alexander von Humbolt and the Genesis of The Voyage of the Beagle	13	(24)
Nigel Leask
2. 'And If It Be a Pretty Woman All the Better'-Darwin and Sexual Selection	37	(15)
George Levine
3. Ordering Creation, or Maybe Not	52	(12)
Harriet Ritvo
4. Chances Are: Henry Buckle, Thomas Hardy, and the Individual at Risk	64	(22)
Helen Small
5. The Psychology of Childhood in Victorian Literature and Medicine	86	(16)
Sally Shuttleworth
6. A Freudian Curiosity	102	(14)
Rachel Bowlby
7. Freud's Theory of Metaphor: Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Nineteenth-Century Science and Figurative Language	116	(15)
Suzanne Raitt
8. On Not Being Able to Sleep	131	(14)
Jacqueline Rose
9. 'Brownie' Sharpe and the Stuff of Dreams	145	(15)
Mary Jacobus
10. On Not Knowing Why: Memorializing the Light Brigade	160	(21)
Truli Tate
11. Sounds of the City: Virginia Woolf and Modern Noise	181	(14)
Kate Flint
12. 'Chloe Liked Olivia': The Woman Scientist, Sex, and Suffrage	195	(17)
Maroula Joannou
13. The Chemistry of Truth and the Literature of Dystopia	212	(21)
Alison Winter
14. Coming of Age	233	(10)
E.F. Keller
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS	243	(2)
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS BY GILLIAN BEER	245	(4)
INDEX	249